and the most
extraordinary powers of amusing, to give you those experiments in
the proper order which will unfold the subject to you step by step;
and after all, an experiment is worth very little to you, unless you
perform it yourself, ask questions about it, or vary it a little to
solve difficulties which arise in your own mind.

Now mind--I do not say all this to make you give up attending
lectures. Heaven forbid. They amuse, that is, they turn the mind
off from business; they relax it, and as it were bathe and refresh
it with new thoughts, after the day's drudgery or the day's
commonplaces; they fill it with pleasant and healthful images for
afterthought. Above all, they make one feel what a fair, wide,
wonderful world one lives in; how much there is to be known, and how
little one knows; and to the earnest man suggest future subjects of
study. I only ask you not to expect from lectures what they can
never give; but as to what they can give, I consider, I assure you,
the lecturer's vocation a most honourable one in the present day,
even if we look on him as on a mere advertiser of nature's wonders.
As such I appear here to-night; not to teach you natural history;
for that you can only teach yourselves: but to set before you the
subject and its value, and if possible, allure some of you to the
study of it.

I have said that lectures do not supply mental training; that only
personal study can do that. The next question is, What study? And
that is a question which I do not answer in a hurry, when I say, The
study of natural history. It is not, certainly, a study which a
young man entering on the business of self-education would be likely
to take up. To him, naturally, man is the most important subject.
His first wish is to know the human world; to know what men are,
what they have thought, what they have done. And therefore, you
find that poetry, history, politics, and philosophy are the matters
which most attract the self-guided student. I do not blame him, but
he seems to me to be beginning at the middle, rather than at the
beginning. I fell into the same fault myself more than once, when I
was younger, and meddled in matters too high for me, instead of
refraining my soul, and keeping it low; so I can sympathise with
others who do so. But I can assure them that they will find such
lofty studies do them good only in proportion as they have first
learnt the art of learning. Unless they have learnt to